God reveals Himself as He heals us – 2 Kings 5:14-17; Luke 17:11-19

Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, Week 28.  Holy Cross Parish.

He was scared.  I was sitting with Br. Thomas, a Holy Cross brother 30 odd years my senior, and I knew he was scared.  They’d found out why he’d lost his appetite and hadn’t been able to keep food down: it was because of the cancers in his GI tract.  He’d been told about how the course of chemo would go, how hard it would be, and he was scared.  We talked, I tried to offer comfort, to just be there, and we prayed, we prayed for healing.  I next visited him right after we’d received a new prognosis from the doctor: the cancer had spread much more aggressively than they’d first thought.  The chemo was now useless, there was nothing to do but manage the pain before he died.  Given how scared the prospect of chemo had made him, I’ll admit that I was scared to go back into his room and be with him, but I went.  He was breath-takingly peaceful.  God had healed Br. Thomas.  He hadn’t taken away his cancer, but he had cast out his fear.  It wasn’t the healing I wanted.  But I couldn’t deny God had healed.  I couldn’t blind myself to the clearly manifest work of God’s hand.  I had to swallow pride, fear and sorrow to do it, but I couldn’t not give thanks.  At Brother’s funeral Mass a month or so later, together we offered the sacrifice of the Mass, our deepest form of thanksgiving.

Mary helps us find Jesus -- Luke 2:41-51

School Mass for Our Lady of the Rosary; Luke 2:41-51; Holy Cross School.

As this was a Mass for children, the homily was a lot more dialogical than a text can reproduce.  They gave good answers!

[What have you lost?  How did you feel when you lost it?  Have you ever found something?  That feels pretty good, huh?]

Mary found Jesus!  She had lost her son; she had lost the Son of God!  But she found him!  Can you imagine the joy!  But that joy must have been tinged with a sobering realization: my little boy’s growing up.  He’s getting more independent.  He’s a young man.  And not just any young man, he’s holding his own with the teachers in the Temple.  He’s in sixth grade, and he’s holding his own with the teachers in the Temple!

WwtW: God shows Himself in His healing action

Bible Study notes for OT C, Wk 28.

2^nd Reading:  2 Kings 5:14-17

Context.          Kings (one book that got divided because it was too long for one scroll) is the completion of the history of Israel, from the giving of the Law in Deuteronomy, ending with the Exile.  It is theological history: not history in a modern, or even classical Greek, sense, but an act of preaching that seeks to answer the question, “given what we know about what happened, what was God’s role in this?”  God gave the Law, the Land, the Kingship, the Priests and the Prophets to guide his people and is displeased when they reject his gifts.  Our story is part of a sequence of ten wonder-stories, showing the power of the prophet Elisha.  Naaman is a foreign commander suffering from a skin disease whose wife sends him to Elisha.  Rather than see him directly, Elisha sends a messenger telling him to wash seven times in the Jordan.

God has life-changing-ly urgent good news for us – Jonah 3:1-10, Luke 10:38-42

Ordinary Time, Tuesday of Week 27.  Holy Cross Parish.

Language is a slippery thing, and Hebrew has always felt especially wily to me, even more so than English.  The way we hear Jonah’s oracle to the Ninevites (“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed”), it sounds like pretty unambiguous bad news to us (for the Ninevites at least).  There’s a phrase in Italian, all translators are traitors (which, fittingly, sounds much better in Italian than in English).  The translators here (one of whom was one of my Hebrew teachers, by the way) have certainly captured in English one of the meanings the Hebrew can have, the meaning the Ninevites seem to have reacted to.  But, the English dries out what is slippery in the inspired Hebrew, and sucks some of the life out of it.  Because, left as it is, we would have an unfulfilled prophecy.  We would have a prophecy with a specific time limit on it, that didn’t come to pass.  We’d be reading about God getting in wrong.

Bulletin Column: Quotable popeables

HCSS Bulletin Column, 10/5-6/13.

Friends,

Last week, we received wonderful news: Bl. Pope John XXIII and Bl. Pope John Paul II will be canonized next year on April 27^th, the Feast of Divine Mercy.  This news especially moved me, as that is the day after my anticipated ordination to the priesthood, the day on which I will preside for the first time at Mass.  In a particular way, this news renewed my eagerness to ask these two great Popes to keep me in their prayers as I prepare to serve the people of God as a priest.  Their gifts to the Church were (and continue to be) immeasurable, but each of them has contributed a quote that I often pray with and has proved a means by which the charity of Christ has urged me on to persevere in the Christian life and my ministry.

God carries others to Him through our consent to being carried – Luke 10:1-21

Ordinary Time, Week 26, Thursday.  Holy Cross Parish.

Throughout the Fall, the Daily Mass lectionary takes us passage by passage through Luke’s account of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Sometimes, a feast day will come up that leads us to depart for a day from this continuous reading and instead incorporate into our Mass a reading more closely linked with the feast.  When that happens, as it has the last couple of days, we end up skipping some of the continuous reading.  It’s like changing the channel to check a sports score and then going back to your movie.  Today, we switch back to our continuous reading of Luke and, if it were a movie, we’d notice that the scene has suddenly shifted.  Up until this point, we’ve spent almost five weeks reading about Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, his home territory.  We turn away for two days, and he’s started moving: he’s turned his face to Jerusalem and begun the journey that will take us the next seven weeks to read about.  And that’s important background, because it matters to remember that all we’re about to read is being spoken by a man who knows he’s walking to his death, who’s willing to do this out of love for us, who’s inaugurating the pilgrimage we now walk, through death to everlasting life.  When he sends out the seventy-two on a difficult journey, he knows what he’s asking.

WwtW: God freely gives us faith

Wednesdays with the Word Bible Study notes for OT C, Wk 27.

Gospel:           Luke 17:5-10

Context.           We continue Jesus’ long journey to Jerusalem (9:51-19:48; Wks 13-31), and wrap up the section of it which is an extended response to the question “who will be saved?”  (13:10-17:10; Wks 21-27).  He is concerned to form community and set boundaries, but in a completely topsy-turvy way that will confound any sense of privilege.